B is for Betrayal
by Zubeneschamali
Summary: The 263rd post Janus List fic out there: a partner's thoughts on betrayal.  Stand alone story.


Title: B is for Betrayal  
Author: Zubeneschamali  
Rating: K+  
Summary: The 263rd post-"Janus List" fic out there: a partner's thoughts on betrayal. Stand-alone story.

Disclaimer: None of the characters contained herein are mine, and I'm only borrowing them for fun. Heck, none of the dialogue was written by me, either. You still interested in reading?

Author's Note: My muse seems to have come back on limited duty…we're negotiating about when I'll be able to write about something other than the season finale…

Quotes taken from "Dark Matter," "Undercurrents," "Spree," and "The Janus List." Thanks to Lady Shelley for maintaining Running the NUMB3RS and to ritt for beta reading.

oooooooooooooooooo

So this is how it goes.

You join the FBI and are assigned a partner more by default than anything else. You start out a little tentative, a little unsure, until one or two cases are under your belts and you realize how well you work together. You start wondering if your boss borrowed the skills of his profiler to match the two of you up, with your strengths and weaknesses complementing each other as well as they do. You don't mention it to your partner, though; he might think you don't appreciate the way the partnership has been constructed, or that you'd rather be matched up with someone else. If you really thought that, you'd be nuts.

"Five bucks says he runs."

"Ten bucks says I catch him."

You work together. You cover each others' backs, and not only figuratively. One evening during a shootout in a not-quite-abandoned warehouse, you hear the genuine fear in his voice as he shouts out to warn you, and you duck to hear a bullet whizzing above your head. When it's his turn a month later, you watch first in horror and then in relief as he narrowly avoids a getting hole in his head. Both times, you share a few beers afterwards, detachedly analyzing the situation as if it had happened to someone else, learning from the mistakes you made and realizing that if it weren't for your partner, you'd be a lot worse off.

"We're the only white people in here."

"Yes…we are."

You share as much of your life with him as you've ever shared with someone you weren't romantically involved with. There are the long hours on stakeouts, or sifting through an acre of dirt to find a single bullet, or trading off interrogation sessions to work the good cop-bad cop strategy for all it's worth. There are the long days in the office paging through paper files and computer screens, trading off the work to get it done faster and more efficiently. There are the quick seconds exchanging smirks behind a mathematician's back as you hear words you thought you left behind in that differential equations class you squeaked through in college. There are the long minutes as you listen to him explain why the case that you've just wrapped up struck so close to home, and then you hand him another beer, because that's what you would do for your brother, and that's what he has become.

"Hey, Granger, man, next time I don't answer my phone, just do me a favor: call the cavalry."

"Yeah, what if you're having sex, huh?"

"Eh, point taken."

You know that even though your backgrounds are completely different—inner city kid escaping the gangs versus country boy escaping the ranch, child of a single mother versus one more member of a large family, born-and-bred New Yorker versus dyed-in-the-wool Westerner—you still have some things in common. Like how the career path that you chose was the only way out of the place where you grew up. Or how you never question standing by each other when a case with personal implications threatens to cloud your judgment. Or how the trial by fire you had in your first posting taught you the importance of trusting your instincts, and trusting the people on your team. And how your joint background in explosives makes you the perfect pair to go rappelling up a bridge to short out a bomber's plans for taking it down.

"In their prime: Ruth or Bonds?"

"Nah, Williams. War hero, played the game clean, no juice."

"Yeah, I'd have taken Ruth. 'Cause he hit all those home runs—and he was drunk."

You stare straight ahead in the interrogation room, realizing how different it is when the one-way glass separates you from your partner not because you're taking turns verbally beating information out of a suspect, but because one of you _is_ the suspect. You listen to your boss's harsh words and stark promises to tear apart the life of someone who had been a trusted team member. You wish this was happening to someone else, that you could step outside this room and that when you returned, all you would see would be the person who has had your back for two years, and who you trust with your life as strongly as you know he can trust you.

"The Chinese bug was in the sofa cushion, where I put it two years ago. I pulled it when David was in the kitchen."

And then he's there in the room with you, cold fury blazing forth as your other team members rush to prevent the kind of unauthorized incident that took place here last fall, the incident no one will speak about on the record but everyone knows was a desperate measure taken in a desperate time to rescue a member of the team. Because that's what you do for each other, not just you and your brother/partner, but all of you. Only now, the team has turned on itself, and you can't for the life of you understand why it had to happen this way.

"How long have you been lying to us?"

And then your heart breaks when you realize that now, because some old man left some things in a voice mail, and because the cover story you're following has designated you as a traitor, despite all of the times you watched over each other and trusted each other with your lives, despite the hint that you dropped him in Taylor Ashby's apartment—when you lift up your head with the lines that you've practiced for this contingency and say that you're a spy and you've been lying to him all along…

He believes every word you say.


End file.
